Nagios and Ruby

Found these links that might interest people.

This looks like a project with some potential.
http://lusislog.blogspot.com/2008/04/nagios-and-ruby.html

Here is an example that looks like it worth pulling apart to see how it ticks.
http://blog.hungrymachine.com/2007/08/14/using-a-ruby-based-aim-notifier-in-nagios/

I've not had a chance to run either, sorry.

Enjoy.


Gnoll110

RailsCamp4: BackgrounDRb

It has been two week since I got back from Railscamp4 in Adelaide. Been off the grid mainly. Took lots of notes and idea point during the weekend.

The first I'd like to note in a background processing utility. It looks interesting but I've not had a chance to use it. Hopefully I will in the next month or so.

Here is the link to BackgrounDRb.

Enjoy


Gnoll110

Ruby scripts (book)

Found out about Basement Books in the Railway Square arcades near Central Station in Sydney.

One on the books I picked up was 'Practical Ruby for Systems Administration' by Andre Ben Hamou (Apress). ISBN-13 978-1-59059-821-4 ISBN-10 1-59059-821-0.

Chapter 2 has a cool beginners script. The first bit on work script in the text.

It's a script to build an empty script and open it in an editor.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

path = ARGV[0]
fail "specify filename to create" unless path

File.open(path, "w") { |f| f.puts "#!/usr/bin/env ruby" }
File.chmod(0755, path)
system "pico", path 

pico is the text editor I use. The example code used "open".

Currently I'm up to chapter 5 and have learn a few thing about Ruby and its what and how.


Gnoll110

Merb in Action

This week, the newest 'Merb in Action' PDF 'arrived' in the mail.

The new version includes chapter 3.

I've been thinking about a Merb play project. I think I'll spike a blog.

There are a few things I'ld like to see in a blog, but seldom do.

One is a nice 'printable' view. You never see one with two printable views, with and without comments. Also with a nice list of footnoted links, you can't double click a print.

What other things should I have in a features list?


Gnoll110

Ads as online tip jar?

Over at twitter, I just twittered this comment.

@gnoll110 Ads as online tip jar? - Seth Godin is wrong http://tinyurl.com/6fb5pg - JD is right http://tinyurl.com/3hrm27

Seth Godin has blogged a string of posts that ended with a post entitled "Ads are the new online tip jar".

I agree with JD. Just click when you have no interest and then not buying sends distorting info to the advertiser. It tell 'em there is something wrong with the ads landing page. When in fact the problem is in the embedded ad or more generally, simply offering a product no one wants.


Gnoll110

Digital Nomads

During the week this great quip and blog post appeared in my RSS reader stream (Google reader).

It introduces a great new community site for those of us trying to use information and communication tech to do our jobs from where we want to do them. That is, not within the commuter zone of some big city.

Should be a great resource!


Noel Kelly
Gnoll110

Agile podcasts: Better late than never.

This month, I got around to checking Rob Payne’s Agile Toolkit site for new podcasts.

Last month Rob put up six new podcasts. One from this year and the reminder from last year’s Agile2007 conference.


1/ Agile IT Experience 2008 Panel Discussion.
Direct download: AgileITx_Panel.mp3

2/ Agile2007 - Esther Derby and Diana Larsen
Direct download: Agile2007_Ester_Diana.mp3

3/ Agile2007 - Nancy Van Schooenderwoert
Direct download: Agile2007_Nancy_V.mp3

4/ Agile2007 - Deb Hartman
Direct download: Agile2007_Deb_Hartman.mp3

5/ Agile2007 - Ole Jepson
Direct download: Agile2007_Ole_Jepson.mp3

6/ Agile2007 - Rick Mugridge
Direct download: Agile2007_Rick_Mugridge.mp3

They all proved to be great listening. Thanks for the time & effort Rob.


Gnoll110

Discovery: Rubyspaces

At Rail Camp, the weekend before last.

While flicking through the index of the pickaxe, I came across an entry for JavaSpaces. Went to the indicated section and found a little bit of sample code that shows the concept.

Run it, worked great. This discovery alone make the trek up to Brisbane Water all worth it.

Gnoll110

Rail sand box!

While at the Canberra Ruby Crew night, on the 30th May, I was introduced to the heroku site.

An IDE (Integrated Development Environment) in a browser.

In this case it a build environment for the Ruby On Rails framework.

Looking forward to playing it.

Will keep people posted, in my copious spear time ;)


Gnoll110

BarCampCanberra1: I

Hi All

Well last saturday saw the first BarCampCanberra. @trib, @pureCaffeine and the other orginazers did a great job.

About 50 to 60 people attended.

During one of the Open Source session we got onto Open Source design of physical objects and then sustainable manufacturing of goods.

I had one comment to contribute. A major book on the subject is 'Cradle to Cradle', written be an American architect and a German chemist. I also noted Ford and a major up market chair maker were doing this kinda work.

Here a the details:
Title: Cradle to Cradle
By: William McDonough & Michael Braungart.
Ford redeveloped its River Rogue plant at Dearborn Michigan using these principles.
The up market chair maker is Herman Miller.
And the book is not made of paper. It's made of polymer, is waterproof and can be used as an industrial feedstock as is.

Hope this help those interested.


Gnoll110

ruby, xml and hpricot

I'm starting to play with xml in ruby. After asking around on IRC, using hpricot was recommend to me.

I've been play a city at myminicity.com.

You can get xml of city details from an URL like this http://gnollford.myminicity.com/xml

I've written a small chunk of ruby that read & analysis the xml and generates a web address the help build the city to best advantage.

require 'net/http'
require 'rubygems'
require 'hpricot'

url = ['http://gnollford.myminicity.com/',
       'http://extremesville.myminicity.com/',
       'http://froosh.myminicity.com/',
       'http://griff-stadt.myminicity.com/',
       'http://warlach.myminicity.com/',
       'http://aeoth.myminicity.com/',
       'http://halloranelder.myminicity.com/',
       'http://cricklewood.myminicity.com/',
       'http://twodogs.myminicity.com/',
       'http://iliad.myminicity.com/',
       'http://meatteam.myminicity.com/',
       'http://aushpb.myminicity.com/',
       'http://brisbane.myminicity.com/']
       
source="NET"
#source="FILE"
       
url.each do |cityurl|

  if source == "NET" 
    xml_data = Net::HTTP.get_response(URI.parse(cityurl+"xml")).body
  else # FILE branch
    xml_data = File.open('data1.xml')
  end

  doc = Hpricot::XML(xml_data)
  (doc/:city).each do |xml_city|
    #puts doc.search("/city/bases").first.attributes["ind"] 
    #puts doc.search("/city/bases").first.attributes["tra"] 
    #puts doc.search("/city/bases").first.attributes["sec"] 
    #puts doc.search("/city/bases").first.attributes["env"] 
    
    region = doc.search("/city/region").first.attributes["code"]
    nm = doc.search("/city/name").first.innerHTML
    ranking = doc.search("/city/ranking").first.innerHTML
   
    typ = ""
    vector = 0
    
    uem = doc.search("/city/unemployment").first.innerHTML.to_i
    if uem > vector
      vector = uem
      typ = "ind"
    end
    
    tra = doc.search("/city/transport").first.innerHTML.to_i
    trap = 100-tra
    if trap > vector
      vector = trap
      typ = "tra"
    end
    
    cri = doc.search("/city/criminality").first.innerHTML.to_i
    if cri > vector
      vector = cri
      typ = "sec"
    end
    
    pol = doc.search("/city/pollution").first.innerHTML.to_i
    if pol > vector
      vector = pol
      typ = "env"
    end

    printf(cityurl+typ+" "+nm+" "+typ+" "+region+" "+ranking+"\n")
  end
end

the output

http://gnollford.myminicity.com/ Gnollford  AU 1743
http://extremesville.myminicity.com/ Extremesville  AU 1450
http://froosh.myminicity.com/tra Froosh tra AU 803
http://griff-stadt.myminicity.com/tra Griff-Stadt tra AU 1029
http://warlach.myminicity.com/ Warlach  AU 1196
http://aeoth.myminicity.com/ind Aeoth ind AU 1304
http://halloranelder.myminicity.com/ HalloranElder  AU 505
http://cricklewood.myminicity.com/ cricklewood  GB 452
http://twodogs.myminicity.com/ TwoDogs  AU 779
http://iliad.myminicity.com/tra Iliad tra AU 81
http://meatteam.myminicity.com/ meatteam  AU 14644
http://aushpb.myminicity.com/env aushpb env AU 82
http://brisbane.myminicity.com/tra brisbane tra AU 3

It easy to take the next step and generate html, I didn't just to keep this blog post's html simple.


Gnoll110

Canberra Ruby Crew

Last Friday night saw the second crew event.

Talked about lots of stuff, both geeky tech and social.

Learn about some new gem and wrapper lib.

Agree that, given the Sydney meets are on the 2nd Wednesday, we would use the 4th Friday of the month. That way our meeting is never less than a week after Sydney. keen peeps can make both ;)

See http://rubyonrails.com.au/canberra-meetups for more info.

Canberra Ruby Crew

There is a new special interest group in town.

The Canberra Ruby Crew (CRC). The first get together was earlier this month.

The second will be of the night of 15 Feb. I'll be there. Don't know the venue yet, stay tune.


Gnoll110

Picked up ‘Refactoring Databases: Evolutionary Database Design’ by Scott W. Ambler & Pramod J. Sadalage at the start of the month.

Ask one of the DBAs at work if he had read any book or articles by Scott Amber. His awnser was ‘Who’s that?’. Not an inspiring reply.

Think ‘Refactoring Databases’ is worth the effort. Looking forward to using some of the ideas when I start using Merb, next week.

Think I’ll get ‘Refactoring to Patterns’ or one or the enterprise pattern books in January.

In January, I think I’ll also try to start pulling a Canberra Ruby group together. Will start with a Coffee get together with the 2 other Canberra guys I meet at the RailsCamp2 at Bacchus March and go from there.


Gnoll110

RailsCamp2 and Merb

RailsCamp 2 was last weekend at Bacchus Marsh, just west of Melbourne.

Was a great weekend. About 40 camper attended.

Learn some new things, including some of the new stuff in the Rails release, due real soon.

Other package I was introduced to include Merb, another framework, that includes a more flexible and extensible structure. Going to look at that this weekend.

There is Flog too. It's a complexity metrics tool.

Lots to play with.


Gnoll110

Agile: new podcast from Agile 2007

Been a busy month.

I note there is a new podcast on Rob Payne’s Agile Toolkit Podcast site.


Rob talks to Johanna Rothman, an author, consultant and agilist at the Agile 2007 conference.

There is no abstract, so it will be a lucky dip. ;) Rob a great interviewer and pick interesting victims, so it's bound to be informative.


Gnoll110

Technorati tags:
agile agile+toolkit podcast rob+payne johanna+rothman

Ruby: First hack

Thursday night, last week, I released some static web pages. That’s nothing special, but the code that built them is, for me.

It’s me first ruby hack. It’s a flikr like doodad.

What it do?

It takes a cd of images (mainly bodybuilding), straight from the developers (I still use an analogue camera, just, but that’s another story). It crops, brands them and then builds a cluster of static web pages around them.

Using Image Magick, via rmagick, I manipulate the images. The images get rotate (if needed), cropped and branded. The data to do this is stored in a mysql data base. Each derived image is also tagged with data, so they can be captioned and grouped later. It is stored in three tables.

Next there is web page formatting. I used staticmatic for this. It based on HAML and SASS.

The formatting data is laid out as a node/leaf arrangement, also in the mysql database. Currently there is only one type of node. That is the root node type of page. All the leaf nodes types currently sit directly connected to the page node. The valid leaf types are navigation, photo grid and album. Currently there is no recursion up a node structure. That’s a future possibility.

That’s two tables, one for node and its one type, page. Not YAGNI (Your Aren’t Going to Need It), but then there is Agile Modelling. There are for leaf tables, Leaf and its three types. Six tables all up.

I’m sure you can guess what navigation and photo grid do.

Album is the complex stuff and the reason I wasted an automated process.

The album is a page cluster. On the page that has the album leaf, you get the results of the specific sports event. The event has divisions. Divisions have competitors, who appear in placing order. If a division or competitor has any photos with their tag, then it becomes a link to a generated page that contains a photo grid with all their tagged photos. The four tables that contain this data are event, division, competitor and place.

Now there is currently only one type of album. If I want an additional album structure for a different event thingy, I’ll refactor. The cluster generating methods would be moved into a command pattern that could be changed by Dependence Injection (DI). But YAGNI says that’s in some tomorrow.

What would I do differently, use rspec from the start.

Well that my first use of ruby in anger.


Gnoll110

Technorati tags:
first+hack ruby staticmatic haml sass

Projects gone bad: guesses dressed as science

Been reading the current edition of E. F. Schumacher’s 1973 classic “Small Is Beautiful”.

In chapter 3, “Resources for Industry”, I’ve just found the provoking paragraph.

It is fashionable today to assume that any figures about the future are better than none. To produce figures about the unknown, the current method is to make a guess about something or other – called an “assumption” – and to derive an estimate from it by subtle calculation. The estimate is the presented as the result of scientific reasoning, something far superior to mere guesswork. This is a pernicious practice which can only lead to the most colossal planning errors, because it offers a bogus answer where, in fact, an entrepreneurial judgment is required.

This paragraph really hits the nail of the head, with regard to one reason why big IT projects fail. So much is unknown, then inferred and finally dressed up as the plan that can be done for a tight budget and time frame.

No one says the Emperor has no cloth. The plan says he is fully dressed.

This is an environmental book. A good book for a generalist read.

Well worth the read.


Gnoll110

Technorati tags:
schumacher small+is+beautiful project+management

Agile Toolkit: Joshua Kerievsky Agile 2007 podcast

Bob Panye has posted the first of his Agile 2007 podcasts.

It's downloading as I type. Thanks for the effort, Bob.

Agile07 - Josh Kerievsky - Scaling training, e-Learning and certification

Josh presented a session, Introduction to Refactoring & Evolutionary Design. No note or overhead so far.


Gnoll110

Technorati tags:
agile agile+toolkit training e+learning bob+payne josh+kerievsky

Life in a 24x7 world: Seesaw

Need to be able to roll your servers processes without bringing a site down. Seewas enables you to increment the version of components in your application, without an outage.

Max Muermann and Matt Allen have written the Seesaw rudy package that lets you roll Mongrel processes.

Matt & Max were working on it at the Hax day, in Sydney, last weekend.

Has a chat to them about the next stage. The hard stage, rolling the database structure forward without downtime. I think it is possible, but the features needed to make it possible need to be part of the bone and muscle of the database management system (DBMS). I'm going to write a post able how I think it could be done and its limits.


Gnoll110

Technorati tags:
agile ruby rails seesaw mongrel matt+allen max+muermann